Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Emily and Sarah Kunstler on Their Documentary "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe"

What is the significance of screening in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival?

Emily Kunstler: We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this. I think that coming here to this festival and thinking about what that meant for us and our film is an important experience for Sarah and me. The film itself doesn’t really deal specifically with Judaism but it’s a film about legacy. It’s about standing up in your lifetime, and courage, making those choices to be socially active. Getting to this festival and in terms of thinking about it being a Jewish film and our father’s being a Jewish lawyer has made us think about the choices he made in the context of the Jewish tradition, which is a completely new experience for us. But it seems quite obvious when we look at it, to see the choices that he made, sort of the history of the prophetic Jewish tradition and the Jewish tradition of social justice and working for the underdog. So that now seems quite obvious to us.

Sarah Kunstler: Our last interview was actually with a reporter who writes for Jewish magazines, a Jewish columnist, and in a very nice way he started asking us, “How Jewish are you?” And it’s an interesting question because we are largely secular Jews. We celebrated some Jewish holidays like Passover and Hannakah, the Jewish holidays that everyone kind of celebrates. But what is it that makes us Jewish and how much of that did we inherit from our father? We didn’t really get religion from our parents. Neither of them really believed in organized religion and it wasn’t a tradition that they passed down to us. And our father didn’t literally link his choices for us or explain his choices to us by tying them to a Jewish identity.

So as a result of that, we didn’t think about that tradition when we were making this film and we didn’t really work through the ideas about what it means to be a Jewish lawyer or how our film connects to Judaism. We were trying to think about why didn’t we do that.I think that because we didn’t get that from our father because he didn’t explain his activism to us in that way, because he didn’t share religion with us, that it wasn’t part of our experience. That said, I think being Jewish is a cultural and a historical and political legacy regardless of whether you embrace the religious traditions or not. We’re at a really weird place in thinking about this because it’s our first Jewish film festival. And it’s our first time really sitting down and thinking about it. The Jewish reporter was saying, “To many of us political leftist Jews, we were proud of him because he was a Jewish lawyer. He was one of us, we claimed him.” And that’s something for Emily and I to be proud of. We have to recognize that not only was he an icon that exists as a radical lawyer, as a troublemaker, as a civil rights lawyer but to the Jewish community he was a Jewish lawyer.

What prompted you to select your father as the topic for your first feature film?

Emily: it just seemed like a natural progression for our work. We had been making advocacy films for people in prison at that time for about seven years. It was around the tenth anniversary of our father’s death. What we do with our work is to combat racism in the criminal justice system. We were thinking about our father’s work, the legacy and for the first time allowing us to think about his influence on us. He died when we were teenagers so it wasn’t something we had ever really had an adult perspective. So we starting thinking about it and it seemed like the natural next step.

It was in part a personal archiving project, the voices we wanted to preserve for our children. People who he’d worked with were passing away one by one. We saw that these stories were being lost and were being co-opted. The civil rights movement was either being relegated to something in the past or was being like, George Bush was speaking at Coretta Scott King’s funeral. History is sort of funny that way and no one was really thinking about it in terms of this ongoing struggle And it was very important to our father. The most important work to do in civil rights was to maintain the rights that we have because as soon as you stop doing that work, they would slip away. So we thought it was an important time to make a movie about racism and about being an antiracist and about courage and social commitment.

We were also both approaching 30 and that’s significant. In addition to being a time when legacy was more important to us, it was also, how do we as relatively younger people connect these struggles for justice to the present day. How do we rescue this history from the past and from being this inaccessible chapter in the history book to being something that’s resonant and relevant and telling this story from our perspective -- having it be our inquiry as people who did not live through those times and are trying to live and breathe activism and social justiceand responsibility was important to us.

This is a personal film, and it’s your first film in which you’ve inserted yourselves. Was that a challenge to have yourselves so directly in the film?

Sarah: I think “inserted ourselves” is an interesting choice of words because that’s definitely how it felt when we started this film. We felt in the beginning that we were inserting ourselves in a story that didn’t belong to us. And it was actually a question when we were first writing a proposal for the film we were going to make. One of the questions we got from potential funders, in a kinder way than this was: what right do you have to insert yourselves in this story?

It was really hard for us to do that because when you grow up with a parent who is kind of larger than life and in a public eye like our father was, you’re used to being on the sidelines and you’re used to not claiming that space. It felt like we were inserting ourselves. It felt like it wasn’t our story. And I think that making this film was a way of claiming that space and owning this story and figuring out how to tell it from our perspective. It’s interesting that a film can do that, that it can be a part of an evolution of your thinking and part of a rite of passage.

Emily: Initially we weren’t sure that we would be a part of this film. We figured out pretty early on that we couldn’t hide that we were his daughters and that we weren’t the right people to make a biopic about him that was completely impersonal and people would be talking to us, like you see in the film as if we were his daughters. And that opened a lot of doors for us and it closed a lot of doors for us. People would never talk to us as if we were impartial. It would always have that degree of intimacy. So we took that on. We made it a strength of the film. We thought that by telling it from our perspective it might be accessible. We didn’t want it to be a film just for baby boomers. We wanted it to be a film that people of our generation would respond to. We thought that telling a story that was in large part a universal story about a father-daughter relationship could be something that would invite a larger audience into the film.

So at what part during the process did you decide that you really did need to be a part of this film?

Emily: It was after the first couple interviews. People kept saying to us, “your dad.” We thought we could go in and we could coach people and say, “Please make sure to call him Bill or Kunstler or whatever else you could call him.” You never know how people are going to deal with you. It was really a struggle throughout the making of this film. We had some terrific producers who helped us shape this film and helped us feel comfortable putting our own voice in it. Sarah and I spent years being behind the camera and really liked being anonymous. In that sense we’re a lot more like our mother in that respect than our father. We’ve never been comfortable being the face of something. We’d much rather work from behind the scenes. So to make that choice is very hard and it’s still hard for us to see it and to feel so vulnerable and to be so exposed in that way.

Sarah: We pretty much knew that we were going to have to do it but we didn’t know how we were going to do it. It was really hard for us to do it. It was a struggle. It was a struggle when we went into the editing room. It was a struggle when we went on shoots because we didn’t know. I mean there’s a relatively new tradition of these memoirs of children making these films about their parents and kind of confronting that history, and often, that story is told with a lot more melodrama than our story is told. There’s a lot more kind of on-screen confrontation where the filmmaker is a protagonist who’s leading you through the story on screen. So we definitely confronted that tradition in making this film, like is that the movie that we want to make? We realized pretty early on that that wasn’t our story. Our differences with our father were more intellectual, like we weren’t abandoned as children. We weren’t confronting a father who left us. We weren’t going to invent this kind of psychological drama in order to make this film.

Emily: We weren’t finding this second family that we never knew about. [laughs] It’s also about dealing with people’s expectations because you want to satisfy that you’ve shared enough with an audience so that they feel like it justifies your presence. So hopefully we found a balance between the personal and the intellectual.

As you were interviewing people was it a way for you to learn more about your father or ask questions that you hadn’t been able to ask before?

Emily: Definitely, I feel like making this film gave us permission to ask the questions in the first place. When a parent dies there’s always things you wish you could have asked. There are always moments when you ask, I wonder what he would say if he were here today. But I think particularly when you lose your parent when you were a teenager. But it was hard to go to people, people that my father knew and ask for their time to sit and just talk with us so it gave us protection in that respect. We had lights and a camera. It made us feel like we were allowed to ask the questions that we always wanted to ask.

Any questions in particular?

Sarah: I think it was more about getting to jump into the storybook. It was getting to make real a history that was recounted to us and a past that didn’t belong to us. It wasn’t truth finding -- there wasn’t a Jerry Springer-esque moment in confronting one’s past.

Emily: Most of what we learned was through a series of collective interviews. But it wasn’t like there was one person who told us oh this and it really made sense to us. We interviewed over 50 people for the film. There are about 30 in the film. So we went out looking for answers but they weren’t targeted. They weren’t directed. We just wanted to talk to everybody about everything they knew and go back and put it altogether and look at it and make sense of it.

Sarah: Our father was really the principle embellisher of his own myth. He was the star of every story. And to get to go back and talk to people who realized that there were other heroes and other stories and other challenges and other risks. That it wasn’t always about him was pretty amazing for us. Earlier today Emily was talking about how this film is a story of transformation, our father’s multiple transformations in going from having a conventional law practice to civil rights to being radicalized but it’s also the transformation of Jean Fritz the [Chicago Seven] juror who is thinking about what America is, the way the world works, and is completely upended by that trial. Or Michael Smith, the prison guard at Attica realizing that he wasn’t protected from the violence and power of the state because he was a guard and there is value in the political struggle of the people he held in captivity. The judge in the Wounded Knee trial who dismissed the charges when he became aware of the misdeeds of the FBI and the government, that this is a story of those multiple transformations and we wouldn’t have known that story if we hadn’t gone looking for it. We wouldn’t have known those particular pieces of that story.

Did you feel that you were wearing two hats, director, daughter and had to try to be objective?

Emily: It’s very hard to keep perspective when you’re so close with the material you’re working with and it was a completely new experience for us so I think you know that’s where outside help came in to really help us keep our heads screwed on and keep our focus.

Sarah: Emily is also the editor and I was also the writer and we are both also producers of the film so it was many hats. Early on we thought we should hire someone to edit the film and that we were too close to it and we shouldn’t be involved at that level. But we wanted to shape the story. We didn’t trust that someone else would be able to tell the story and we’ve always edited our own stuff so we threw caution to the wind. And I’m glad we worked through it. People make films in different ways and a lot of people have clear-cut ideas, even in documentary of where they’re going to start, what is their arc, who their characters are going to be, and what’s going to happen at the end. Because our story was really a journey of discovery, we didn’t know necessarily. We had some vague ideas, we knew his life, his arc but we didn’t know what we would want. So the film was really built in large part through the writing and through the editing without being involved 100 percent in the process.

Emily: The whole process from beginning to end was really difficult. It was hard physical work and hard emotional work. It was also so rewarding. We got to give our father life again. We got to breathe life back into him. And we’re so grateful that we had that experience. There’s such a great archive of footage on him so we could go back and look at and find answers to some hard questions.

Any last thoughts?

Emily: What’s most important message about this film is a message about courage and responsibility and the power of the individual. We hope that what people take from the film is not that it’s a hero’s journey or a story about an infallible person but that it’s a story about a man who made choices in his life and who took risks, risks that we all could take in our own lives.

Malcolm X (1925-1965)

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)

"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."

Nina Simone (1933-2003)

"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)

"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .

Angela Davis (b. 1944)

"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857

Cecil Taylor (b. 1929)

“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”

Ella Baker (1903-1986)

"Strong people don't need strong leaders"

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

"The artist must take sides, He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery, I had no alternative"

John Coltrane (1926-1967)

"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."

Miles Davis (1926-1991)

"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."

C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."

Edward Said (1935-2003)

“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not﻿ waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

Editor's Bio

Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.